Good old common sense in the FT

Because I agree with him, I must say that Phillip Stephens talks customary good sense in the FT on the already wracked state of the ConDemNation, and the resultant opportunity for Labour:
ConDemNation: "Britain’s coalition government set out its plans to eliminate the fiscal deficit in the bright sunlight of certain conviction. A couple of months later, it confronts the chilling realities of shrinking the state...Nick Clegg protested the other day that the spending cuts drawn up in Whitehall were “not dramatically different” to plans laid by the previous government. This softening in the language of austerity says it all. The Liberal Democrat leader once thought “savage” reductions were vital to repair the nation’s finances. Now he must weigh the political costs..."
Labour: "David [Miliband] is the choice of those at the top of the party, who are keen to return to power. Alone, he has talked about rebuilding the coalition that won the party three election victories from 1997. His handicap is that this tags him as the Blairite choice... Ed, the younger Miliband, who could yet win as everybody’s second choice, has offered mostly mush – policies and promises calculated to make the party feel good about itself and about his candidacy... By choosing David Miliband, Labour would be saying it wanted to win back England’s aspirant classes – that it was still serious about power. But the party’s heart could yet rule its head. Mr Clegg – and Mr Cameron – are cheering on the younger of the two brothers."

Clegg: Dear me how...

Hopi Sen deserves credit for making more widely known this cringe-inducing report by the excellent Paraic O'Brien of BBC London News, wherein the so-called Deputy Prime Minister finds himself hoist by his own New Politics petard:

Living through ConDemNation (cont.)

Last week I was chatting to an old friend, one of the most brilliant men I know – a Communist in his youth, undoubtedly a man of the Left thereafter – and he couldn’t have been more pleased about the ConDemNation, essentially on the grounds of Ken Clarke letting out the prisoners, fixed-term parliaments, having a capable Old Etonian in Number 10, and (my friend fondly imagines) the prospect of Tony Blair in the Hague for having ordered David Kelly’s death. ‘All my friends voted Lib Dem’, he told me. ‘Don’t tell me you voted Labour…!?’

John Rentoul would think my friend a certain psychological type (‘Blair-Hater’), though there are issues on which the two of them would agree: ‘Labour’, my friend scoffed very accurately, ‘spend their last months writing cheques they knew would bounce’ – and so, goes the argument, Labour must be mindful of how they criticise those doing the harrowing now.
Still, Labour’s task is easier when George Osborne reneges on the pledge to preserve capital spending. The spiffy Michael Gove didn’t look too 'progressive' the other day, halting all those school builds and riposting to Labour, ‘What would you cut?’ Labour’s current mouthpieces famously don’t always have a ready answer, but I think they can be trusted for a sensible view on rotting Nissen huts that continue to serve as schoolhouses. (I’m more and more bewildered too as to why the NHS was ring-fenced. I don’t know 'what I would cut', was I President of Freedonia, but presumably a lot of it would be done line by line, and I’m pretty sure I'd know how to start there with the NHS.)
Labour have it easier still when the slavering Tory blogger Guido Fawkes freely derides Danny Alexander as 'Beaker' while cheering on 'Beaker''s doltish but concerted axe-wielding. Thus your actual ideological Tory: let’s cut now, hard as humanly possible, it’ll hurt all the right sorts and come 2015 we’ll have the world turned rightside up and a ‘proper’ tax-cutting Budget.
To this tumescence are the Lib Dems the soapy handmaidens. Veteran Commons sketch writer Simon Hoggart had some good sport with Clegg the other day, saying that he ‘often has the air of a schoolboy who has spent too long in his bedroom, working out plans for an imaginary country that exists only in his head.... an ideal state in which justice, fairness and sheer practicality fight each other for position.’

I think Hoggart astutely skewers a certain sort of Lib Dem sanctimony, but misses the actual nastiness of Clegg, so evident in his snide grin – not the debating society nerd, rather the seemingly dull but straight-arrow chap who secretly fancied being the Bully of Upper Sixth. For the moment I can’t think of a more risible, self-impressed figure in high-level British politics within my lifetime than Nick Clegg – and yes, I’m including John Prescott in that. It’s just the appalling inverse ratio of votes to status that goes on offending.
During Clegg’s brief and imaginary ‘popularity’ prior to polling day, Christopher Hitchens (for whom Clegg once interned at The Nation, and who seemed to find him likeable) observed that ‘British society is actually a three-party system stitched and corseted into a two-party duopoly.’ I think, though, that the coalition exposed that notion as folly. Steve Richards argued today that ‘[a]s some of Cameron's allies recognised long ago, there was no gap between them and Clegg on the central issue of the economy, public spending and the role of the state. On the other side of Clegg's party are those who are closer to being social democrats…’ But the lesson is: it’s a duopoly really, all that matters is to which wing the Lib Dems peel off on the big issues once they have to; and once Clegg had compared the unions to non-dom Tory potentates like Lord Ashcroft then we knew for sure what way he peeled.

Many a pundit has thrown back at Clegg his pre-power conviction that the AV voting system would be ‘miserable little compromise.’ In response Clegg usually offers a lecture on the duties of power and leadership, which often involve miserable little compromises (Nick in his own person happening to be one such...) But I’m interested to be having a vote on electoral reform next May, though I’ve never been a fan of the notion, and I’ll wait to see how the arguments by those wiser than me stack up.
The hopeless Mary Riddell wrote lately that for Labour ‘[to] vote No would be a move against progress and a sign that Labour is a disunited, foot-dragging party, committed to the broken, first past the post system for tactical reasons.’ Oh, the dishonour! Tactical reasons! Simon Jenkins, whom I generally like not one bit, calls it right when he says AV is no sort of ‘progress’, merely a redistribution of a man’s honest vote, ‘away from liking towards ‘not disliking’’. Jenkins continues:
‘Clegg is for AV because it helps his party, and Cameron and Labour will fight it at a referendum because it does not help them. The electorate is bored by the topic. Clegg is almost certain to lose, which will enrage his party and leave him with a bloodied nose and the coalition weakened.’
Good show. I can’t say I don’t like the sound of those tactics, or that imagined outcome. Presumably Mary Riddell thinks Labour need some more of that thrusting New Politics dynamism we’ve all heard so much of, until we vomited. Well, Mary, a week is plenty long in politics, and the time remaining before Labour elects a new leader still stretches in the distance, but the next election is still aeons away, during which time you and the rest of us should try to keep thinking. For now, Labour should attack the coalition partners whenever they see fit. Let’s see where we’ve got to in a few years.
And finally, what news of my man David Miliband? It’s rumoured the Unite union are working out who to back (which ‘Stop David’ candidate) expressly in order to frustrate the hopes of the ‘Blairite’ candidate. Elsewhere DM put his name to a fairly blah column about Englishness in the New Statesman and gave a not-bad Telegraph interview (to Mary Riddell…) wherein he properly regretted the Iraq war’s ‘toll in British and Iraqi life’, properly abhorred the prospect of the coalition’s ‘constitutional gerrymandering’ and reasonably marked his priorities as education, crime and anti-social behaviour. In short, it's like Blair were in the room, a little humbled by recent history, nonetheless feeling its hand on his shoulder...

Budget 2010: Make the best of us, not the worst

For me as for many, I suspect, the merchant bankers snagged by TV news cameras supping in Corney & Barrow last night (could have been any C&B, didn't matter) looked altogether too relieved and thirsty and ready for the weekend. Not that I didn’t want the markets to approve the ‘Unavoidable Budget’™, you understand – au contraire. I was just fantasising that the markets' handmaidens might have to feel as sober and filled with foreboding as the rest of us, at least for an evening.
Because I have no imagination I couldn’t foretell any of yesterday’s Budget except for what had been leaked, plus the surety that Nick Clegg would be talking it up weasel-style in front of a camera and his imaginary legion of fans. I almost didn’t want to buy outright the Krugman thesis that we are on the brink of a historic error, austerity in a time of weak demand. And I didn’t fancy going along automatically with Alastair Campbell’s tribal reading of the runes: “...George Osborne puts the fragile recovery at risk with his ideological onslaught on public services, by pretending the economy is worse than it is, and using the quisling Lib Dems as political cover.”

However, it seems clear today that the poorest areas and people in this country have been disproportionately hit by Osborne’s cleaver. As Tory minister Bob Neill put it with such candour a few weeks back, "those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt." (Eh?) Anthony Painter gave a strong response today: “any group that disproportionately relies on benefits will be marginalised, plunged into poverty, and facing despair. This is not the way it’s meant to be. Not in a decent, relatively wealthy society. The basic post-war compact on support and advancement for all in exchange for doing the responsible thing was broken yesterday. Not only lone parents, but also those who are poor, mentally impaired or incapacitated, the disabled, certain minority groups, and anyone relying on benefits to get by.”

Now, to say quickly - I do appreciate the rebuttal that to live 'disproportionately' on benefit is not right for any capable and able-bodied person, and in those cases should not be encouraged/tolerated. I agree that the public sector contains waste (and by that I include the NHS) and that Labour was going to have to cut big too. I’m not in fear of 'Bankrupt Britain' but I can feel the horror in the concept of interest on national debt exceeding the economy’s growth rate. I just haven’t ever trusted the Conservatives to do the harrowing – they’ve never been notably skilful at it. But I agree with Hopi Sen that it’s not a case of 'whether' but of ‘whose public sector pensions and pay should be cut.’ (Even John Redwood seemed to show some appreciation of the case for exemption of the low-paid public servant on Newsnight last week.)

And still, the thought of 25% less spending by government departments is stomach-churning. Surely paying more tax would be cheaper? This blog favoured the D. Miliband ratio of spending cuts to tax rises (2:1) rather than what looks like the 77-23 split of G. Osborne. That would be what’s properly called ‘a progressive alternative’, if the tax rises were sensibly applied to some of the sorts of ‘middle and high-income earners’ who were feeling so cheery round the bars of Broadgate and Exchange Square last night. But, but… I also acknowledge and defer to what John Rentoul described the other day as: “a strong “tree” bias (“Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that man behind that tree,” as Andrew Dilnot, formerly of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, once surprised me by chanting in a television interview).” And if everyone with taxable earnings between £37K and £150K is to be taxed at 40%, and at 50% above that, then that’s about as much income tax as I would have thought proper or permissible.

I do understand the thinking and appeal of a firm smack from government so as to teach that Britain should ‘live within its means.’ But the other day John Redwood did that quaint Tory thing of comparing the nation’s economy to a domestic household knuckling down to unavoidable frugality: ‘I know it is asking a lot for an outbreak of commonsense by public sector CEOs in councils and quangos. But can they spare us the crocodile tears and the parade of the bleeding stumps? Can they do what any household or company does when faced with a few percent off their income? Just get on and manage it in the least damaging way possible.’ Redwood’s analogies, however, were all drawn Margaret-style from good Grantham housekeeping: (‘You can holiday nearer at home… eat in more than in the local restaurants… draw some money out of the savings account... buy more of the value items at the supermarket, and put more vegetarian dishes into the home menus.’)
I’m sure a great many Britons have come to terms with the end of their excessive consumption based on borrowing, and so would fit Redwood’s model. If you are a company, though, then you just have to fire a proportion of your staff. And if you are someone who never earned enough to have significant savings, or weren’t reared on a middle-class diet, and did all your eating indoors on ‘value items’ anyway… What commonsense homily has John Redwood got to tell you then?

Labour has to offer an alternative, of course. No sitting on the hands. I further agree with Hopi Sen that this alternative ‘needs to be built on creating growth’, ‘we need to create jobs to grow’, and so we ‘need to be talking about measures to support private sector job creation and these can’t be simply extensions of State Aid.’ For sure, with all these benefit cuts we’re looking at a big reserve army of the unemployed. But, really, where will the jobs come from? Can anyone say? They’re hardly going to emerge blithely when people are afraid to spend, businesses afraid to invest, and our imagined export markets are outbidding each other in the austerity stakes, Germany 'leading by example' etc.

Over to you then, D. Miliband...

Waking up to the ConDemNation

A dear and erudite friend texted me this morning with his customary wit and wisdom: 'I haven’t felt that sick seeing those two public school ****s standing in that garden since sometime around 1989… Cromwell would be ****ing outraged.'

True, and I do like to feel a bit of loathing and fury myself, it’s good for the soul in the right measure. And yet, over the whole comical Con/Lib business I think I could keep my shirt on - were it not for this outrageous fixed-term stitch-up. 2015 before we get a chance to return a verdict on these jokers? Unless there’s a 55% no confidence vote? C’mon you Con/Lib ****s - you're having a laugh. Jack Straw called in right on this morning’s R4 Today: "completely undemocratic and totally unworkable."
"Let's say this rule was passed where you require 55 per cent of the Commons vote to have an election. What if 51 per cent of the Commons was against any confidence in the government and was refusing to pass legislation? You then get into the extraordinary position where parliament could not be dissolved...but government would be completely unworkable."

To my mind Jack Straw hit quite a vein of form in the latter years of New Labour, and he writes well in today’s Times about the present and future dilemmas:

"Our overall result was not good — the second-lowest share of our postwar vote. But expectations had been so low that there is real relief that we did better than anyone expected even three weeks ago, when polls put us in the low 20s, below the Liberal Democrats. Palpable relief, too, among so many colleagues in marginal seats who never expected to be back… Above all, relief that we have to stand on our own, sort out our future without being engulfed in the miasma of a coalition deal with the Lib Dems… [A]lliances are not, in the end, a matter of calculus but of chemistry. It doesn’t work between Labour (new or old) and the Liberal Democrats... So what of our future?... First Labour must take the lead in defining its record, and in honouring Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s legacy. If we don’t, our opponents will seek to do so in a pejorative way… Second, we must avoid the visceral divisions that followed our 1979 defeat, putting us out of power for 18 years… Third, we must look carefully at the message of the election. It was broadly good in Scotland and Wales, not bad in conurbations and towns such as mine, but in what the psephologist Peter Kellner describes as the motorway corridors in England, it was far from good. Getting back the vote of “decent hard-working families” is imperative... The good news is that all of the potential candidates get this…"

I hope so, Jack, I really do.